Kristian Lundberg's Yarden from 2009 is one of the most important literary works about contemporary Swedish class society and one of the most significant contributions to the new wave of working-class literature emerging in Sweden in recent years. It tells – in a self-reflexive, and often highly poetic way – the story of a writer and critic from a working-class background who, because of a tax debt, is forced to start working as a manual labourer at a transshipment hub for cars in the city of Malmö, known as "the yard".
The aim of this article is to analyse how Yarden's representation of the class injustices suffered by manual labourers in contemporary Sweden and Lundberg's aesthetic-political strategies are conditioned both by the general ideological changes accompanying Sweden's transformation into a multicultural and post-industrial society and by ideological conditions specific to the realm of literature.